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Bike station at Toronto City Hall shelved after $650,000 already spent

Designs for the City Hall bike station were complete and ready to be tendered when the project was quietly shelved by staff in 2011.

A bike station is supposed to be built in the City Hall parking garage, but plans hit a road bump when it was learned that the station would take up 24 parking spaces that would have potential revenue of $70,000 annually.
(Vince Talotta / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

The city spent $650,000 on a bike station under Nathan Phillips Square before the project was quietly shelved by staff in 2011, a decision some councillors say should have come back to council for approval.

“That seems very strange,” said Councillor Paula Fletcher. “The scope of work for the Nathan Phillips Square revitalization is part of a pretty public restoration. That should have been reported out.”

Council approved $1.2 million in funding for the station in 2010. The $650,000 was spent on design as well as electrical and mechanical servicing. The remaining money, $550,000, is still sitting in the budget, said city spokesperson Natasha Hinds Fitzsimmins.

The project was revived last month at a government management committee meeting.

The showers are made of concrete blocks and finished inside with the “most economical porcelain tile you can get but that you can still clean,” said Frontini. As well, the storage area for the bikes is basically a metal cage.

“We had more expensive versions,” he says, but the final design was “certainly not a cathedral to cycling. It’s basic infrastructure.”

Initial plans called for the station, which would accommodate 150 bikes, to be located underground on the east side of the square, but it was decided that getting bikes up and down using an elevator was too unwieldy for users.

It took months to draw up a new plan so that the facility, now with secure parking for 380 bikes, would be closer to the Queen St. W. entrance ramp into the parking garage.

The design was complete and drawings were ready to be tendered when transportation services became aware of a road bump in 2011.

The station would take up 24 parking spaces in the Toronto Parking Authority garage below City Hall, which would otherwise have potential revenue of $70,000 annually. All city departments had been told to cut 10 per cent from their budgets, and transportation services decided to defer the station until it could justify paying the parking authority the lost revenue, according to city staff.

A report from the city manager’s office done in 2012 at the request of Councillor Joe Mihevc says transportation services felt the bike station could be reinitiated if it was economically viable. But the department would wait to see how new bike stations coming online in the next two years fared before making a decision.

Mihevc said he only became aware the bike station wasn’t being built after talking to construction workers on the revitalization project.

“Everyone assumed (the station) was going in, and to find out how it somehow got cut is totally unsettling,” Mihevc says. “When I pursued the questions with staff, that’s when I found out it was cut.”

The division head “had the authority to defer this project to a future year without requiring city council approval,” city spokesperson Steve Johnston wrote in an email. “The project was not cancelled, just deferred and plans for the revitalization do not preclude the implementation of the bike station in the future.”

The bike station came back into play Monday after the committee passed a motion to waive the $70,000 potential revenue loss and direct transportation services to begin building the project.

The decision goes to council for approval on May 7.

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